Arduous
Andre is done for.
A girl dates back to arms.
I’m not saying they bother me
or ‘men are my future’,
merely how hard this has been.
Zyzio
Hans Ulrich Obrist throws bread to the swans in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens
in central London. It’s early morning. The bread isn’t stale. The swans are not
white; they are grey-brown. One of the swans is sitting a good distance away from the
main body of the group. It’s darker or dirtier than the rest and shows no interest in the
bread. Its eyes are closed and its neck is bent at an angle that allows it to rest its head
on its back. Hans Ulrich Obrist approaches the swan.
As he gets close, the swan opens its eyes and lifts its head. Its neck sways and it lets
out a rasp from its grey beak. Hans Ulrich Obrist takes a slice of bread from the bag
and tears out a small piece with no crusts, tossing it directly in front of the swan. The
swan ignores the bread, but the rest of the group swarms over, trampling the crustless
piece and nipping at the bag in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s hands. The swan looks resigned.
It tries to reposition its head on its back but misses and lays it on the tarmac instead. It
closes its eyes. Hans Ulrich Obrist turns and leaves the pond area.
That evening, he is unable to sleep, and the following morning he wakes
uncharacteristically late, at 10:47 AM, to a series of emails and one missed call from the
team at the gallery. He postpones responding and gets dressed. He walks to the park and
alerts the warden to the sick swan. He feels no sense of immediate relief but finds that
he is once again able to focus on other things. When he visits the pond area again two
days later, the sick swan is gone, and he senses that it has been euthanised. The
crustless piece of bread is still partially visible, specked with dirt and embedded in the
tarmac. It doesn’t at all resemble the unmistakable image of Mary Immaculate, mother
of Jesus. A light snow does not begin to fall.
Sophie Collins is co-founder of tender, an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry London and Oxford Poetry.
